World Famous Comics: Gerald's Party (Coover, Robert)
Gerald's Party (Coover, Robert)
By: Robert Coover Publisher: Grove Press Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Grove Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 320 Publication Date: September 25, 1997
Robert Coover's wicked and surreally comic novel takes place at a chilling, ribald, and absolutely fascinating party. Amid the drunken guests, a woman turns up murdered on the living room floor. Around the corpse, one of several the evening produces, Gerald's party goes on — a chatter of voices, names, faces, overheard gags, rounds of storytelling, and a mounting curve of desire. What Coover has in store for his guests (besides an evening gone mad) is part murder mystery, part British parlor drama, and part sly and dazzling meditation on time, theater, and love.
If the Apocalypse were a party in the suburbs... --it would look something like the shindig being thrown in Robert Coovers *Geralds Party.* Think Sartres *No Exit* but with a lot more guests, a lot more sex, and a lot more dead folks. Youre not reading this book for plot, anymore than you'd read Samuel Beckett for plot, so don't expect anything to really `happen' in the conventional sense. Nor should you expect anything to be resolved--or even make `sense.' In other words, this novel is a lot like life, only without all the humanizing illusions that ordinarily shield us from what lies just beneath. As such, Coover throws a party that is largely a battlefield of warring lusts, jealousies, rages, and largely futile yearnings after transcendence--a party that reveals the radically anti-social beneath the social conventions that draw us together. Having said that, this is an extremely funny text, a comedy, if you will, in the classical sense of that term, in the Dantesque sense, surely...this being a party that could easily be taking place in Hell, if Hell were the home of a typically married couple in suburbia, which, of course, it all too often is.
Language, too, is an important part of this novel--the sensual labyrinth of expression that words, as words, can take and Coover is a master at weaving words into a reality all their own. He has, in fact, `reinvented' the world in his unique and distinctive style which is an accomplishment only the very best writers of any generation achieve. Coover is, indeed, one of the very best, and *Geralds Party* may be his finest book.
Humanity: What a riot! "Gerald's Party" depicts a single evening in the life of Gerry, a married man who has opened his home to a flood of strange friends, and describes the chaotic string of strange events which occur. The book is written in real time, its 300 pages comprising a single narrative, unbroken by chapters, from the party's beginning to its end. Gerry is the narrator, proceeding from event to event, unable to control anything, and hardly able to understand anything, including himself.
The book is experimental, but does have a plot, concerning a murder-mystery at Gerry's party of strange guests. The story is told in the tradition of surrealists, however, and not a straightforward narrative. Once the reader settles into understanding how the story works, it becomes a joyful romp through mad times.
The theme of the book is very simple: life is a major mess, and it just keeps going. People eat and drink, sleep and sex, live and die, digest and waste, kill and protect, mate monogamously and share polyamorally, control themselves and let themselves go, have children and have fun, grow up and act childish, dirty and clean, dress and undress, lie and speak true, think scientifically and think artistically, fantasize and live pragmatically, search for philosophical meaning and live hedonistically for today. And they never stop! Robert Coover pushes all the buttons in the psyche of the human animal, as if writing a reference manual for an extraterrestrial, telling it: "Here's humanity. Welcome to it!"
This book is experimental and surreal, but arguably more accessible than Beckett, and certainly more earthy and explicit. (This is so Coover can push all your buttons.) It uses an interesting form of dialog occasionally: two or three different conversations interweave their lines, making it a joyful challenge to follow along, and creating interesting intersections at times. There are two dozen characters, all with their own independent dynamic, and Coover mixes them with entertaining effect. Some are consistent, such as the wife, the son, the mother-in-law, and others, who exercise their own unique idiosyncracies steadily throughout the book, like pschological points of reference interweaving with the other characters.
This book is very well done. I cannot praise it highly enough. Coover deserves immense credit for pulling it all off. Once the reader understands the story is meant to be absurd, not literal, it becomes great fun, very vivid, and memorable. Coover is extremely imaginative, and "Gerald's Party" is a fantastic riot.
Wild, wacky, wicked and very smart. In my journey through the landscape of contemporary post-modern fiction it was about time that I paid some attention to Coover's work. Based on the reviews of his novels at Amazon, I decided to give this book a try. ...
Gerald's party is a prime example of postmodern metafiction. The story and its plotline function as mere vehicles for the exploration of a number of ideas/concepts, while the fiction is expertly geared towards the reader experiencing this wild party.
Integrating elements from two movie classics -a lot from Fellini's Satyricon and a little from Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe- injecting copious amounts of de Sade in the "party scene" from Gaddis' Recognitions and appropriating the play within a play concept from Hamlet at its zenith, Gerald's party uses theatre and time to analyze the process of perception and its resulting reality. In addition, Coover provides the reader with an encore that ranks high on the list of most cynical analyses of human relationships on record.
Coover has done a masterful job of throwing the reader in a party that has too much of any imaginable thing. While reading the discourse provides a lot of fun, it takes an effort not to get lost throwing darts in the basement. Yet, this is the work of an evil genius and finishing it left me with a feeling of awe for it's creator, while not necessarily agreeing with Coover's philosophy.
So prospective reader is this a book for you? In case you belong to the fans of Fellini's masterpiece and/or have enjoyed works by Gaddis/Pynchon/Wallace/de Lillo, I would certainly join the party.
f'd up. This is a very intelligent, beautifully written book; yet, for me, there just was not enough natural momentum to carry the whole thing off. Time...one of the main obsessions in the life of this novel, and the idea of Time being nonexistent, and ever the same with only spacial relations changing is one that is dwelled on by some of the characters. And that's the problem with this novel, with the idea of time thrown out the window every page read the exact same. Read any 30 pages and you will enjoy them immensly but to keep it up for 300 pages is more stamina than i could produce.
There were so many funny scenes though!! But, like a David Lynch movie, after awhile the bizzarities just become repetitive and annoying, with nothing deeper underlying them. Some of the kids from Coover's generations (Barth, Vonnegut, kind of Barthelme) seem to do things that would be more fun to think up and write than to actually read. With these guys (i hate to group, but oh well) you can almost always imagine them slyly smiling behind the page at their zany little creation or attack on the prevailing form of fiction. It often comes off as too academic.
At the same time not at all... there is way more chaos and madness than most uptight, imaginitively limited professors could ever handle, brimming in blood, unsound meditations, dizzying desire... i guess i dont know what to think about this novel... i kind of think Coover may be one of those writers who sometime down the road i will want to scream at myself for ever criticizing.
the fall of the West Here is a book that is apparently about decadence. All of the characters are in some way connected to the theater community and artifice is therefore their business. There is a great deal of confusion between what is real and what is feigned, imagined, projected or merely confusing. The reader sees everything through the eyes and mind of the eponymous party host. Gerald is a womanizer and a hopeless relativist. For most of the evening he tries to understand and rationalize increasingly outrageous behavior on the part of his party guests and the police who come to investigate the murder of one his party guests.
Yes, this is a murder mystery, or at least it is a parody of one. The number of dead bodies that turn up is never certain, but there at least four. The first body (and the only murder that the police investigate) is that of Ros, a bad actress and a loose woman who is much beloved by everyone at the party, male and female. She is an innocent, a creature of pure impulse and she is beautiful. But as the evening progresses you realize that no one really knows her and that she is perhaps unknowable. At some point Coover suggests that she is the personification of Truth; the police detective reveals that Ros looks exactly like a mysterious woman who he has met only in his dreams and who his therapist has told him symbolizes Truth.
Coover uses people's memories and ritual use of the body of Ros to show that this community (apparently representing all of us) has a very shakey relationship with the Truth. Ros is all things to all people. Some party guests initially keen hysterically over her loss, while others simply shake their heads and pretend to have seen it coming. In the course of the evening, however, she is reduced to a memory and her body to a stage prop and a symbol.
Coover repeatedly juxtaposes the mundane with the horrifying. Policemen eat sandwiches while they are beating recalcitrant guests. Gerald's wife shows off the sewing room to the new neighbors while he is lying on the floor of the same room unable to remove his penis from a teenager that he has just (accidentally) deflowered. In order to get better light on the shot a cameraman asks Gerald to move to one side while he is comforting his best friend, who as been shot in the heart by the police.
This is a hilarious and depressing book. If you don't have a strong stomach for irony or don't think that debauchery is funny, then it probably isn't for you. If you enjoy being told that the bourgeoise are going (have gone) to hell in a handbasket, then read with pleasure.
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